[Note: This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article published as “Getting It Wrong in ‘The Lady of Shalott’,” Victorian Poetry 47 (2009), 45-59.]

Getting It Wrong in “The Lady of Shalott”

Erik Gray

Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses famously declares, “Video meliora proboque, /

deteriora sequor” – I see what is better, and I approve of it; I pursue what is worse.i The

passage is justly celebrated, because it transforms what could be a simple commonplace –

people do wrong, even when they know better – into something far more paradoxical.

Medea’s three staccato transitive verbs emphasize the deliberateness of her declaration.

She is not succumbing to a sudden temptation, or even to any temptation at all. The way

the lines are phrased does not imply a choice of something sinful but desirable over an

abstract but unappealing “good.” Medea not only recognizes what is better, she relishes

it; yet she actively pursues what is detrimental. The sense of deliberateness is reinforced

by Ovid’s use of first-person, present-tense discourse in this passage: at the very moment

that she is getting it wrong, Medea is fully aware of what she is doing. Yet self-

consciousness benefits her not at all. Without explanation – there is no conjunction

between her preferring the better and pursuing the worse, only a dramatic line-break –

Medea relinquishes her self-determination and her self-interest at once.

Ovid’s Medea finds a parallel in Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. Most fairy-tale

curses are not brought on consciously or deliberately. Sleeping Beauty, for instance (the

subject of a poem in Tennyson’s 1830 volume that was then expanded into an entire

sequence, “The Day-Dream,” in 1842), falls under her spell when she pricks her finger –

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a mere accidental slip of the pin. The Lady of Shalott, by contrast, is aware of the curse

that hangs over her, and she brings it upon herself with a series of decisive actions.

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water-lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

She looked down to Camelot.ii

The syntax, anaphoric and asyndetic, is even more deliberate than Ovid’s. “After over a

hundred lines of mainly intransitive description,” as Herbert Tucker writes, we are

suddenly given an “electric series of transitives in [these] lines (not ‘walked,’ even, but

with prosodic reinforcement, ‘made three paces’).”iii Yet even as she performs these

actions, the Lady remains conscious of their fateful consequences: “‘The curse is come

upon me,’ cried / The Lady of Shalott” (ll. 116-117). The very moment when the Lady at

last acts with whole-hearted determination is also the moment when she knowingly gives

herself up to an outside force.

The powerful fascination of this scene, I propose, derives from its archetypal

familiarity. To put oneself under a curse – to know that one is getting things wrong, and

yet to pursue – is essential to the experience of creating art. It has long been a critical

commonplace that “The Lady of Shalott,” like many of Tennyson’s early poems, is

concerned with the role of the artist. Likewise, critics have often noted how frequently

Tennyson’s poetry of this period explores the paradox of deliberately willing away one’s

will, actively renouncing agency, as exemplified most explicitly in “The Lotos-Eaters.”iv

These two topics are of course closely connected: to become an artist has traditionally

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been seen as a surrendering of oneself to a higher power, to a Muse or other source of

inspiration. But Tennyson’s distinction lies in his equation of artistic creation with a

compulsion to pursue what is worse, a consciousness of getting things wrong. This is an

experience with which every artist – even the greatest – must be familiar: to know what is

better; to know what one approves and admires; and yet with every word, every

brushstroke, every stitch, to watch oneself do worse. If artists were unwilling to put

themselves under this necessity, there would scarcely be any art.

Although this condition may apply to all art, the paradox is more poignant in the

case of the verbal arts, because there is no physical medium intervening between the

perception of what is better and its pursuit; criticism and literature both take place in

language. Moreover, all writers are in some sense critics first: we begin early on to

recognize what we like or don’t like in a story, a song, a nursery rhyme. And yet this

consciousness, or even the ability to articulate what you find better or worse in a work of

literature, does not prevent you from writing a story or a line of poetry that you feel to be

all wrong. Just because you can say what you like, in other words, doesn’t mean that you

will like what you say. This limitation applies even to so precociously confident a poet

as Tennyson, who recalled that “At about twelve and onward I wrote an epic of six

thousand lines…. I never felt myself more truly inspired.”v Yet Tennyson too was a

critic first: the earliest surviving piece of his writing is a letter to his aunt containing an

extended commentary upon the beauties and faults of Milton’s Samson Agonistes.vi The

choice of text seems uncannily prescient, because Milton’s Samson is one of the great

exemplars in English poetry of deteriora sequor. Three times Dalila asks Samson to

reveal the secret of his strength; three times he gives a false answer, and each time she

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openly and undisguisedly tries to use it to betray him; and yet the fourth time – not

deceived, but clearly perceiving how mistaken he is even as he does it – Samson reveals

his secret and is undone. Many years later Tennyson would revisit the Samson plot in

“Merlin and Vivien”: Merlin too sees precisely how he will betray himself, yet does it

anyway.vii

Tennyson was not the first to recognize avowed failure or mistake as an essential

aspect of poetic creation. Percy Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry,” for instance, describes

composition as the inevitably doomed and insufficient attempt to recapture an original

flash of inspiration.viii But whereas in Shelley the force of inspiration is wholly positive,

and failure begins only with our conscious attempts at transcription, in Tennyson’s model

inspiration itself can be a “curse,” as often compelling poets to write worse than their

critical judgment would allow as to write better (just as rhyme can force a poet into both

unexpected insights and unwonted infelicities). This simultaneity distinguishes

Tennyson’s conception likewise from the common wisdom that poetry is produced by a

succession of inspiration and reflection, flights of pure fancy modified by subsequent

revision of faults and weaknesses.ix In Tennyson’s view, recognition of one’s mistakes

comes not in retrospect but at the moment they are committed – or even in prospect.

Hence, in the crucial final simile of “The Lady of Shalott,” the heroine is said to be “Like

some bold seër in a trance, / Seeing all his own mischance” (ll. 128-129). The Lady, in

other words, resembles Merlin: she is at once clairvoyant and helpless. It is a condition

that Tennyson himself knew well. Throughout his career, Tennyson was painfully

conscious of the myriad faults he perceived in his own poetry, and many of his comments

show that he was dissatisfied with his poems even as he produced them. “Don’t abuse

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my book,” he wrote just as his 1842 collection was being published; “you can’t hate it

more than I do.”x And yet he wrote on.

My reading of “The Lady of Shalott,” then, sees the Lady as a poet figure, but I

join a number of other critics in reversing the usual allegory. When the Lady leaves her

loom to put herself under the curse, she is not renouncing her life as an artist, but

becoming an artist.xi She is abandoning the repetitious, perfectible craft of weaving and

instead wilfully entering a state in which she cannot assert her will – in which, crucially,

she sees all her own mistakes and yet commits them anyway. There are several

significant consequences to reading the poem in this way. The first concerns the question

of Tennyson’s revisions. It has generally been understood that Tennyson’s hyper-

sensitivity to criticism led him first to delay publication of his early poems and then to

revise them extensively in response to negative comments from reviewers.xii No doubt

Tennyson was acutely conscious of his audience: the response of a possibly

uncomprehending public is figured in “The Lady of Shalott” both in the reapers and in

the knights of Camelot at the end. (I return to the latter at the conclusion of this essay.)

But as Christopher Ricks notes, “The matter of Tennyson’s alleged deference to

reviewers is intricate,” since “Tennyson’s own dissatisfactions complicate the issue.”xiii

No reviewer was as severe on Tennyson’s early poems as he was himself, and “The Lady

of Shalott” illustrates this self-criticism. Unlike such earlier productions as “The Poet”

and “The Poet’s Mind” – those “grandiloquent cheer-leadings for poetry” as Ricks calls

them (Ricks, p. 47) – “The Lady of Shalott” shows the poet coming before the public

fully conscious of how much is amiss. It thus discourages the too easy assumption that

Tennyson’s poetic misgivings were dictated by outside opinion.

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A second and larger significance of this reading concerns Tennyson’s place in

contemporary debates about the nature of free will. In their analysis of “The Lady of

Shalott,” Zelda and Julian Boyd find that the poem’s linguistic features reflect a broader

tendency in Tennyson, who “can only act when he sees his doings as the fulfillment of a

Will not his own.”xiv This assessment aligns Tennyson firmly with the mainstream of

Victorian thinking on the subject of will, as described by John R. Reed: “Free will in the

nineteenth century may be defined as man’s capacity to put himself at one with some

transcendent law.”xv But “The Lady of Shalott” depicts art as almost a parody of this

ideal: the Lady submits her will, not to a “transcendent law,” but to a curse. She

demonstrates admirable willpower in breaking through the inertia of her original state,

but she exerts it towards a consciously imperfect aim. As Matthew Campbell, in his

study of will in Victorian poetry, remarks, “Actions performed against one’s better

judgement may be carried out with strength of purpose and will.”xvi It is important to

recognize just how often the actions of Tennyson’s poems fit this description – how often

they illustrate the poetic dilemma of deliberately pursuing the worse.

In what follows I begin by considering the paradox of conscious error, examining

its role in a number of Tennyson’s early poems. I then look at Tennyson’s three major

re-envisionings of “The Lady of Shalott,” which demonstrate his continuing fascination

with this paradox as an essential element of artistic creation. The first rewriting occurred

when Tennyson significantly revised “The Lady of Shalott” for republication in 1842.

The revisions blur the distinctions between Shalott and Camelot and so reinforce the

sense that the Lady remains an artist when she submits to the curse and quits her tower.

The next two rewritings of the story both come in the 1859 volume, Idylls of the King.

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This, the earliest version of Tennyson’s great work, contains four episodes, the middle

two of which, “Vivien” and “Elaine,” both revisit the story of the Lady of Shalott; in the

completed Idylls, the same two poems, now retitled “Merlin and Vivien” and “Lancelot

and Elaine,” remain together at the center of the poem. “Merlin and Vivien” picks up the

image of the “bold seër … seeing all his own mischance” from “The Lady of Shalott” and

makes him the principal figure of the story. In doing so, the idyll draws out the central

action of the earlier poem, the conscious bringing on of the curse, to almost unbearable

length. What in “The Lady of Shalott” might seem a momentary impulse is shown in

“Merlin and Vivien” in extreme slow motion as a disastrously deliberate submission.

“Lancelot and Elaine,” meanwhile, elaborates and expands the basic plot of “The Lady of

Shalott,” as Tennyson noted himself.xvii This retelling of the story reinforces once again

the lesson of deteriora sequor: the central characters clearly see the distress they are

causing themselves, yet they carry on. In conclusion I look at one last “rewriting” – an

unpublished poem in which Tennyson closely echoes the conclusion of “The Lady of

Shalott” – in order to recall that not all poetic consciousness is consciousness of error.

Far more often Tennyson was able to recognize that he had found the words he wanted.

I have said that the paradox of conscious error at the heart of “The Lady of

Shalott” is powerful because it is familiar to us from art; but it is worth noting that the

paradox pertains just as strongly to the poem’s other great subject, love. One can know

precisely what one needs and wants in a lover, and yet such knowledge does not prevent

one from pursuing someone who has none of these qualities. To say that the Lady makes

an error in fixating upon Lancelot is not to disparage Lancelot himself, about whom we

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know little. Nor is it to suggest that the Lady ought to have stayed forever at her loom: as

I note below, she seems to be equally cursed if she stays her weaving or if she stays at it.

But if the Lady’s hope in breaking away from her loom is to escape the companionship of

mere images (“I am half sick of shadows,” l. 71), then we can say with assurance that

Lancelot is precisely the wrong choice of love-object. As Tucker points out, “Lancelot is

no presence, but pure representation: a man of mirrors, a signifier as hollow as the song

he sings” (Tucker, p. 112).

The Lady shares her predicament with other Tennyson heroines of the 1830s, who

usually have more ample time for consideration than she does and yet act in the same

fashion. Mariana for instance recognizes explicitly, not only that her lover cometh not,

but that “He will not come” (“Mariana,” l. 82); nonetheless, she continues to wait for

him. Similarly, Oenone is able to offer perfectly sage advice when she tells Paris which

goddess he should choose as the fairest: “Paris pondered, and I cried, ‘O Paris, / Give [the

apple] to Pallas!’” (“Oenone,” ll. 165-166). Yet she herself chooses as unworthily as he,

reserving her affection for the very man whose betrayal of her she has just witnessed. At

the conclusion of the poem Oenone goes to seek out Cassandra, and her choice of

companion is apt; just as foresight is of no benefit to the latter, so her own better

knowledge cannot help the former. To draw another Miltonic parallel: Paris’ choice

resembles the fall of Eve, a giving-in to instant temptation, ambition, and desire (although

Paris hands the fruit over, rather than receiving it).xviii Oenone’s poor decision, by

contrast, resembles the fall of Adam – a conscious, deliberate, undeceived pursuit of what

one knows to be inferior.

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This predicament is less familiar as an aspect of poetry than of love but perhaps

even more essential. It is represented most explicitly, as I have mentioned, in Tennyson’s

“The Lotos-Eaters.” If the poem had depicted Ulysses’ mariners as simply succumbing

to temptation – to a life of pleasure on an island more perfect than their own – it would

have lacked the tension that makes it so powerful. As it stands, however, the mariners

must work hard to convince themselves and each other to remain in the land of the lotos;

to give themselves up to idleness requires an act of will. This is clear from the moment

in the poem when the idea of permanently abjuring responsibility is first put forth.

Then some one said, ‘We will return no more;’

And all at once they sang, ‘Our island home

Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.’

(ll. 43-45)

“All at once” carries the double sense of “suddenly” and “in unison,” and both meanings

are paradoxical. Having become nearly catatonic in the previous stanzas, the mariners

suddenly perk up at the idea that their lassitude might be permanent. Likewise, they

embrace the prospect of being able to care each man for himself, rather than working

towards the common good, and yet they express this egoism by beginning to chant all

together. The whole rest of the poem consists of their “Choric Song,” which we must

imagine them to be somehow extemporizing in unison. But the paradox of choosing to

improvise collectively is appropriate not only to lotos-eating, but to Tennyson’s very

conception of “song” or poetic composition. Both imply a relinquishing of the individual

will; and yet such relinquishing itself requires a forceful act of volition, since the power

to which one is submitting is known to be imperfect.

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Hence as the Choric Song progresses, its rhythms move from utter languor to

vigorous determination, until by the end the meter has settled into a regular drumbeat.

The final change of rhythm is introduced in the following lines:

We have had enough of action, and of motion we,

Rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard, where the surge was seething free,

Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.

(ll. 150-155)

The notion of men binding themselves by oath to relinquish responsibility resembles the

paradox of people joining together to extemporize. But the sense of conscious

commitment is necessary, because living in Lotos-land, like extemporizing – and like all

composition, in Tennyson’s view – requires that one be knowingly “careless.” The state

to which the mariners aspire is one of fault, not default. It needs willpower to begin,

because one is committing oneself to being as mistaken as the Lucretian gods that the

poem goes on to describe.

It is notable that “Oenone” and “The Lotos-Eaters,” originally published in 1832,

were both heavily revised for their republication ten years later. The final section of the

latter, for instance, was entirely rewritten: the lines I have just quoted, and the strident

rhythm they introduce, were new in 1842. Tennyson was not in this case responding to

reviewers’ criticisms – appropriately, since the passage vows to ignore the cries and

complaints of humankind – but only to his own sense of what was wrong or wanting in

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the poem. There is nothing unusual in a poet’s revising his or her work, of course, but it

seems particularly apt that these two and “The Lady of Shalott” should be the poems

Tennyson rewrote most extensively for the new volume, since they are all concerned with

conscious error. Of the three “The Lady of Shalott” was the most drastically revised.

The original version emphasizes, even more than the final one, the clear-sightedness with

which the Lady recognizes her own “mischance” in Part IV. A passage omitted in 1842

describes how deliberately she repeats the forbidden action of looking down to Camelot:

Her wide eyes fixed on Camelot,

Though the squally eastwind keenly

Blew, with folded arms serenely

By the water stood the queenly

Lady of Shalott.

The ensuing stanza then continues the imagery of open-eyed determination: “With a

steady, stony glance”; this was revised in 1842 to “And down the river’s dim expanse.”

The final version of the poem still preserves a strong sense both of the Lady’s

deliberateness and of her self-awareness. But it softens some of the hard edges and stark

contrasts of the earlier version: in 1832 the Lady’s “smooth face sharpened slowly” in

death; in 1842, by contrast, “her blood was frozen slowly.” The removal of such harsh

imagery as the Lady’s sharpened features and stony stare reduces the bitter ironies of the

poem’s original ending and thus helps efface any strict dichotomy between inner and

outer worlds. Tennyson is reputed to have said that the Lady moves “out of the region of

shadows into that of realities,” but this already doubtful gloss could apply only to the first

version; the 1842 version refuses such easy distinctions.xix Its most significant alteration,

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as a number of critics have noted, regards the phrasing of the curse. In the original

version there is no doubt as to what the Lady must not do – “A curse is on her if she stay /

Her weaving, either night or day.” In 1842, by contrast, the curse is perfectly ambiguous:

“A curse is on her if she stay / To look down to Camelot” (ll. 40-41). As W. David Shaw

asks, “Does ‘stay’ mean ‘remain’ or ‘refrain from’?”xx The Lady seems to be cursed

whether she goes or stays, whether she stops to look or delays her look. The moral

equivalence suggested by the newly ambivalent phrasing precludes a simplistic “shadow

vs. reality” reading. Instead, we are presented with two equally shadowy aesthetic

worlds: the one within the tower, where the Lady practices her secure but purely mimetic

craft; and the world of Camelot and Lancelot – shadowy too, but in a far more brilliant

and dangerous way. The 1842 version thus encourages us to read the outside world as

representing, not “reality,” but a higher form of artistic creation, which with all its

attendant risks and conscious errors the Lady nevertheless chooses over the safe and

secondary exercises she has hitherto preferred. It is no accident that only after she has

made this choice does her song develop from “echoes” (l. 30) into something more fully

realized, a “carol, mournful, holy, / Chanted loudly” (ll. 145-146) – even if it is her

swansong.xxi

The 1842 revisions downplay the defiant perversity of the Lady’s choice,

therefore, in order to emphasize that the choice is in fact an aesthetic one. But

Tennyson’s return to the same story in “Merlin and Vivien” (1859) draws out the moment

of choice to much greater length, thus rendering it far more self-conscious, and more

obviously paradoxical, than in the earlier poem. What in “The Lady of Shalott” occupies

a stanza or two – her nearly simultaneous perception of Lancelot and deliberate

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capitulation to the curse – forms the whole substance of the later idyll. Even without the

extra time for reflection and debate, Merlin’s decision is more baffling than the Lady’s.

He is a wizard, after all, and apparently capable of seeing some way into the future.

Asked by Vivien why he has abruptly left Arthur’s court,

Merlin locked his hand in hers and said:

‘O did ye never lie upon the shore,

And watch the curled white of the coming wave

Glassed in the slippery sand before it breaks?

Even such a wave, but not so pleasurable,

Dark in the glass of some presageful mood,

Had I for three days seen, ready to fall.’

(ll. 288-294)

Merlin’s flight away from Camelot reverses the direction of the Lady’s, but his language

in this passage, the imagery of waves and shadowy reflections, distinctly recalls the

earlier poem. Even more strikingly, Merlin’s response to his sense of impending doom,

like the Lady’s, is to climb into a vessel – Merlin “found a little boat, and stept into it” (l.

196) – and to give himself up to the will of the elements.

The wave that Merlin describes in his speech is merely metaphorical.

Nevertheless, the perfect illogic that the imagery suggests – Merlin foresees a storm and

therefore puts out to sea in an undersized boat – typifies his behavior. Even more

explicitly than the Lady, Merlin determines what the worst possible course of action

would be, then performs it. The choice that faces him in “Merlin and Vivien” concerns

whether or not to entrust Vivien with a powerful “charm,” a spell performed “With

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woven paces and with waving arms” that leaves its victim apparently “Closed in the four

walls of a hollow tower” (ll. 203-207). The language in which the charm is described

once again deliberately recalls “The Lady of Shalott” – not only the “tower” with its

“four walls,” but the weaving, the pacing, and even the waving (“who has seen her wave

her hand?”). The spell is obviously dangerous – Merlin, in another reminiscence of the

Lady, calls it a “cursèd charm” (l. 433) – and Merlin therefore refuses at first to reveal it.

For several hundred lines Vivien plies him with flattery and sexual temptations, and he

seems at times to soften, but still keeps silent. Frustrated, she grows spiteful, and Merlin

then clearly sees through all her earlier blandishments, muttering, “I will not let her

know” (l. 821). And yet despite this resolution, which is followed by no less than a

thunderbolt from heaven as a sign of Vivien’s intent to betray him, Merlin acts in total

defiance of his better knowledge and betrays himself.

“Merlin and Vivien” thus greatly expands the paradox of conscious error found in

“The Lady of Shalott.” The paradox seems to pertain more to love than to poetic

composition in this case, although there are hints of the latter as well. Merlin the wizard

“Was also Bard,” we are told, and Vivien confirms the title, calling him “Her seer, her

bard, her silver star of eve” (ll. 167, 952). His error, moreover, involves a “charm” –

etymologically a carmen, or song.xxii The association grows stronger, however, in the

next episode in Idylls of the King, “Lancelot and Elaine.” This episode is self-evidently

another version of “The Lady of Shalott”: both works draw upon the same traditional

Arthurian material, although Tennyson claimed to have been unaware of the full version

of the Elaine legend when he composed the earlier poem. In any case, “Lancelot and

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Elaine” makes no attempt to hide its filiations with “The Lady of Shalott,” which are

obvious from the opening lines.

Elaine the fair, Elaine the loveable,

Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat,

High in her chamber up a tower to the east

Guarded the sacred shield of Lancelot.

(ll. 1-4)

The lily and the tower reappear from the opening stanzas of the earlier poem, while the

repetition of Elaine’s name allows her to appear as “fair Elaine … of Astolat,” echoing

the “fairy Lady of Shalott” invoked by the reapers at the end of Part I. As before,

Lancelot is introduced together with his emblematic shield. Even the key word

“loveable,” hanging unfulfilled at the end of the first line, seems to pick up phonetically

the “Long fields of barley” that occupy the same syllabic position in the earlier work.

The deliberate echoes return at the end of the idyll, after Elaine floats into Camelot, when

Lancelot “mused at her” (l. 1260), just as he “mused a little space” at the Lady of Shalott.

“Muse” has a particularly ironic ring here, because although Lancelot speaks

more, and more articulately, in the idyll than in “The Lady of Shalott,” he would not

claim that his speech is inspired. To the contrary, he is acutely conscious of the

insufficiency of the words he speaks, even as he pronounces them. Just before Elaine’s

appearance, as he presents the “nine-years-fought-for diamonds” to the queen, Lancelot

clumsily asks her to receive them as

An armlet for the roundest arm on earth,

Or necklace for a neck to which the swan’s

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Is tawnier than the cygnet’s: these are words:

Your beauty is your beauty, and I sin

In speaking, yet O grant my worship of it

Words, as we grant grief tears. Such sin in words

Perchance, we both can pardon.

(ll. 1160, 1176-1182)

Lancelot’s errant words are all the more surprising since, as Tennyson is at pains to

remind us, he has had nearly a decade to prepare them. Establishing a series of annual

jousts for the diamonds, Arthur claims that they will serve as a “nine years’ proof” of

might and true worthiness (l. 62). The time-period is deliberately chosen: nine years is

the length of time the Lady of the Lake spent fashioning Excalibur, according to the

“Morte d’Arthur.” It is also, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reminds us, the length of time

that Horace in his Ars Poetica recommends that one should leave a poem alone before

publishing, as a “proof” (to use Arthur’s appropriately textual terminology) of its

worth.xxiii The diamonds and the words that accompany them are thus associated: both

have been long-prepared and hard won. But all of the time and self-reflection in the

world cannot help Lancelot make his speech effective; his delay may be Horatian, but his

words, as he himself feels, are flaccid. They only seem to make things worse: Guinevere

turns his flattery around, calling the diamonds “An armlet for an arm [i.e. Elaine’s] to

which the Queen’s / Is haggard, or a necklace for a neck / O as much fairer” (ll. 1219-

1221). In a gesture reminiscent of the Lady’s, she seizes the diamonds and, ruining the

work of years in a moment, turns and tosses them out the window into the river.

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Almost immediately the diamonds seem to transform, like magic beans, into

Elaine: “right across / Where these had fallen, slowly past the barge / Whereon the lily

maid of Astolat / Lay smiling, like a star in blackest night” (ll. 1232-1235). Elaine, like

the diamonds, has been increasingly associated with words that come admittedly too late.

At the beginning of the poem she contents herself with the imitative and functional art of

embroidering a protective case for Lancelot’s shield. But after Lancelot leaves her

without a farewell and she submits to the inevitability of her disappointment, Elaine

changes her occupation; the case seems like “poor work” to her now, and she begins

instead to sing her plaintive “Song of Love and Death” (ll. 984, 998). As she sings, her

very appearance becomes textualized:

As when we dwell upon a word we know,

Repeating, till the word we know so well

Becomes a wonder, and we know not why,

So dwelt the father on her face, and thought

‘Is this Elaine?’

(ll. 1020-1024)

The simile is particularly apt, since all of Elaine’s remaining words and gestures are both

familiar and strangely empty. The Lady of Shalott followed Lancelot down the river and

died in her pursuit; Elaine, in a more consciously futile (and self-consciously aesthetic)

gesture, decrees that she will float down to Camelot only after she has died. Similarly,

the parchment that the Lady bore with her in the 1832 version served at least an

identificatory purpose. But Elaine already knows Lancelot all too well, and her letter

therefore acknowledges its own belated inadequacy: “I loved you, and my love had no

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return, / And therefore my true love has been my death” (ll. 1268-1269). Elaine’s

appearance makes both Lancelot and Guinevere realize that, like her, they have

consciously bound themselves to a love that can only go wrong – “love’s curse,” as

Lancelot calls it, introducing that key word once again (l. 1342). So it is, and poetry’s

too. But if Elaine had not committed herself, like the Lady, to entering such a curse, she

had never writ, nor no man ever loved.

When the Lady floats into Camelot at the conclusion of the 1832 version of “The

Lady of Shalott,” she is greeted with incomprehension.

They crossed themselves, their stars they blest,

Knight, minstrel, abbot, squire and guest.

There lay a parchment on her breast,

That puzzled more than all the rest,

The wellfed wits at Camelot.

The lines could be taken as evidence of Tennyson’s anxiety concerning the reception of

his poem. If so, his fears were partly justified: John Stuart Mill, in an otherwise wholly

positive review, called this final stanza “a ‘lame and impotent conclusion,’ where no

conclusion was required.”xxiv Yet Tennyson showed no resentment; to the contrary, when

he rewrote the final stanza for 1842, he toned down the sarcasm directed at the audience.

Who is this? and what is here?

And in the lighted palace near

Died the sound of royal cheer;

And they crossed themselves for fear,

19

All the knights at Camelot;

But Lancelot mused a little space;

He said, ‘She has a lovely face;

God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott.’

(ll. 163-171)

In keeping with the other 1842 revisions, the new stanza softens the harsh ironies and

contrasts of the original version. The irony that remains is a mournful situational irony,

as Lancelot at last returns the Lady’s appreciative gaze, but too late.

Critical opinion concerning Lancelot’s response is divided. A small majority of

critics considers his words to be culpably superficial and reductive, while a dissenting

minority defends his speech as being, under the circumstances, as sensitively reflective as

could be expected.xxv I concur rather with the latter opinion, all the more because there

occurs an important echo of Lancelot’s words in a later poem of Tennyson’s. In 1851

Alfred and Emily Tennyson’s first child, a son, was stillborn. Tennyson wrote, but did

not publish, a short poem on the occasion, “Little bosom not yet cold,” which concludes

with these lines:

Whate’er thou wert, whate’er thou art,

Whose life was ended ere thy breath begun,

Thou nine-months neighbour of my dear one’s heart,

And howsoe’er thou liest blind and mute,

Thou lookest bold and resolute,

God bless thee dearest son.

20

(ll. 8-13)

Tennyson finds himself in the unexpected position of addressing a stranger who is not

wholly a stranger, whom he encounters, after much expectation, only when it is too late.

His final two lines adhere almost exactly to Lancelot’s formula. He praises the child’s

appearance – the only aspect of the stranger to which he has access – and then, like

Lancelot, follows with a blessing and a concluding address (“dearest son”). There is no

reason to think that Tennyson was conscious of the parallel. But the echo nevertheless

suggests that Tennyson was not inclined to be critical of Lancelot’s closing words. To

the contrary, he seems to imply that, on this occasion at least, he got it right.

21

i Ovid, Metamorphoses, 7.20-21.

ii Lines 109-113. All quotations from Tennyson’s poetry refer to The Poems of Tennyson,

2nd edn., ed. Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987).

iii Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass:

Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), p. 114.

iv On the traditional reading of “The Lady of Shalott” as an allegory of the conflict

between art and reality, see below, note 11. More recent, more self-conscious

allegorizations have made use of the poem to describe the workings and developments of

Tennyson’s poetry, and of Victorian poetry more generally; see Gerhard Joseph,

Tennyson and the Text: The Weaver’s Shuttle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

1992), pp. 102-123, and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “‘The Lady of Shalott’ and the Critical

Fortunes of Victorian Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed.

Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 25-45. On the complex

place of agency in Tennyson’s poetry – what Joseph calls the “hovering state between the

fatality of suffering victim and the agency of the striving, seeking, unyielding hero” (p.

172) – see William Brashear, The Living Will: A Study of Tennyson and Nineteenth-

Century Subjectivism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969).

v Hallam, Lord Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1897),

1:12; hereafter cited as Memoir.

vi The letter is reprinted in Memoir 1:7-9, and in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed.

Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982-1990), 1: 1-2

(hereafter cited as Letters).

22

vii See my Milton and the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2009), pp. xxx-xxx.

viii In Shelley’s famous simile: “[T]he mind in creation is as a fading coal which some

invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to a transitory brightness: … but

when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious

poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the

original conceptions of the poet”; see David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers, 2nd

edn. (New York: Heinle and Heinle, 1995), pp. 1143-1144.

ix Wordsworth implies such a model in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “Poems to which

any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man

who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and

deeply. For our continual influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts”

(Perkins, English Romantic Writers, p. 425). Tennyson’s model of composition is closer

to Keats’s Negative Capability – “when man is capable of being in uncertainties,

Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (ibid., p. 1276). The

Lady, however, is in no doubt: she clearly sees her own missteps.

x To Edward FitzGerald, early July, 1842 (Letters 1:204). The comments are not merely

defensive: although FitzGerald was often critical of Tennyson’s work later in life, in 1842

he was at the height of his enthusiasm for Tennyson’s poetry and was one of those who,

in Tennyson’s words, had “continually urged [him] to publish” in spite of his doubts

(1:204). A few weeks later, responding to a letter from an admirer of his new book,

Tennyson wrote almost ungraciously, “The admiration which you profess for my

volumes must seem to me in some measure misplaced. I can seldom open them without

23

feeling hatred of their imperfections” (1:207). See also his similar comments on the

publication of The Princess, in Letters 1:281-282.

xi The notion that the Lady leaves the realm of art to enter the contrasting realm of the

real world forms the basis of many readings of the poem, beginning in the nineteenth

century and continuing strong through the twentieth. See for instance Jerome Hamilton

Buckley, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press,

1960), pp. 49-50; Clyde de L. Ryals, Theme and Symbol in Tennyson’s Poems to 1850

(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 72-76; Gerhard Joseph,

Tennysonian Love: The Strange Diagonal (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,

1969), pp. 48-50; Alastair W. Thomson, The Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 41-44; Daniel Albright, Tennyson: The Muses’ Tug-of-War

(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1986), pp. 30-32. Major challenges to this

notion, which read Camelot as representing instead another (and higher) realm of art or

imagination, include James L. Hill, “Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’: The Ambiguity

of Commitment,” Centennial Review 12 (1968): 415-429; Flavia M. Alaya, “Tennyson’s

‘The Lady of Shalott’: The Triumph of Art,” VP 8 (1970): 273-289; A. Dwight Culler,

The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 44-49; and Edgar F.

Shannon, Jr., “Poetry as Vision: Sight and Insight in ‘The Lady of Shalott’,” VP 19

(1981): 207-223. All of the latter, however, read the Lady’s act as transcendent; none

considers her choice of the curse as representing a conscious pursuit of something worse,

as well as better.

xii On Tennyson’s critics and their effect upon his poetry, see Edgar F. Shannon, Jr.,

Tennyson and the Reviewers (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952).

24

xiii Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 65n.

xiv Zelda Boyd and Julian Boyd, “To Lose the Name of Action: The Semantics of Action

and Motion in Tennyson’s Poetry,” PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of

Literature 2 (1977): 27.

xv John R. Reed, Victorian Will (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1989), p. 197. The notion

was venerable and widespread; as Tennyson succinctly puts it in In Memoriam, “Our

wills are ours, to make them thine” (Prologue, l. 16).

xvi Matthew Campbell, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge

Univ. Press, 1999), p. 31. For the most part, however, Campbell, like Reed in his

excellent chapter on “Romantic to Victorian Poetry” (pp. 164-198), concerns himself

with actions that consciously strive for what is better.

xvii See Ricks’s headnotes to both poems for Tennyson’s comments on their sources. The

connection between the two has often been commented on; see especially Constance W.

Hassett and James Richardson, “Looking at Elaine: Keats, Tennyson, and the Directions

of the Poetic Gaze,” in Arthurian Women: A Casebook, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New

York: Garland, 1996), pp. 287-303. The relation between “The Lady of Shalott” and

“Merlin and Vivien” is much less frequently discussed.

xviii Culler writes that the depiction of Paris’ choice in “Oenone” “has echoes of the

temptation scenes in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and, indeed, it is less a

judgment scene than a temptation. It is a temptation to judge, as well as to judge wrong”;

The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 79.

xix Memoir 1:117; but Culler, as Ricks’s headnote points out, casts doubt on the

attribution of this comment to Tennyson (The Poetry of Tennyson, p. 44).

25

xx W. David Shaw, Tennyson’s Style (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p. 64. See also

Isobel Armstrong, “Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’: Victorian Mythography and the

Politics of Narcissism,” in The Sun is God: Painting, Literature and Mythology in the

Nineteenth Century, ed. J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 49-107.

Armstrong remarks, “If she pauses to look out of the window, she brings the curse upon

herself. If she remains, … she is equally cursed”; this underlines a condition in which

“the opposition between ‘real’ and ‘inner’ worlds dissolves” (pp. 59, 63).

xxi In 1832 the Lady’s song is explicitly compared to that of “dying swans,” who

traditionally sing only when dying. This reinforces the suggestion that the Lady achieves

a true artistic vocation only after she leaves her loom. On the image, see Catherine B.

Stevenson, “Tennyson’s Dying Swans: Mythology and the Definition of the Poet’s Role,”

SEL 20 (1980): 621-635.

xxii It is possible that the “charm / Of woven paces and of waving hands,” as it is

repeatedly called, is wordless. But Merlin associates it with poetry after he hears

Vivien’s song: “Vivien, when you sang me that sweet rhyme, / I felt as though you knew

this cursèd charm, / Were proving it on me” (ll. 432-434).

xxiii Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in

Nineteenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), p. 271.

xxiv See John D. Jump, ed., Tennyson: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 89.

xxv The most vocal disapprovers of Lancelot include James R. Kincaid, Tennyson’s Major

Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 34-35,

and Carl Plasa, “‘Cracked from Side to Side’: Sexual Politics in ‘The Lady of Shalott’,”

26

VP 30 (1992): 247-263. Lancelot is defended by Alaya, “Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of

Shalott’,” pp. 286-287, and Shannon, “Poetry as Vision,” p. 222. For good readings that

mediate between the two positions, see Joseph Chadwick, “A Blessing and a Curse: The

Poetics of Privacy in Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’,” VP 24 (1986): 13-30, and

Hassett and Richardson, “Looking at Elaine,” p. 299.